Dry for now, but scattered storms develop again this weekend

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Enjoying the dry air and sunshine? It’s getting hotter without adding much oppressive humidity for now, but the humidity sneaks up a little each day until you can really start feeling that sticky difference again by the weekend.

We stay comfortably mild tonight: lows around 60ºF to 65ºF with a clear sky. Thursday looks a little hotter and only slightly more humid; expect a high in the lower 90s with a ‘feels like’ temp right around 92ºF. Friday still looks dry, but we’ll see some scattered storms in thicker humidity for the weekend ahead.

Why humidity makes it feel hotter: Temperatures rising into the 90s with low humidity make it hot enough, but when you add a lot more moisture to the air, it ‘feels’ a lot worse!

Why? The ‘heat index’ is the apparent temperature: what it feels like to your body. Our body’s natural cooling mechanism is evaporation of sweat. The drier the air is, the easier it is for that sweat to evaporate. More humidity means less evaporation and less cooling making it feel hotter than it really is outside.

That same process makes you colder when you get out of a swimming pool on a dry, breezy day as opposed to a humid day with little or no wind even at the same air temperature.

Weekend heat and storms: The heat index climbs to the 95ºF to 100ºF range this weekend as Gulf moisture surges north and temperatures climb into the upper 80s and lower 90s.

A few pop-up, isolated, hit-or-miss, brief showers/storms are possible Saturday. The chance of any one spot in North Alabama or Tennessee getting rain? Only around 10% Saturday.

Storms look more promising on Sunday, but even then, it won’t rain evenly or everywhere. Some communities will get a downpour; others won’t see a drop of rain because of the scattered, spotty nature of the storms.

Better chance of storms soon: Rain rarely falls in widespread soakings this time of year. While our ‘chance’ of storms may be higher on one day or another, there are no guarantees that any single neighborhood or plot of land will or won’t get it on a specific day.

Monday brings our ‘best’ chance of rain for the next seven days at 60%. That’s also a 40% chance that it will not rain on you.

Total rainfall through the middle of next week on average looks to be about normal for June: around 1" to 1.5" for the majority of North Alabama and Southern Tennessee.